W3C Welcomes Members at Advisory Committee Meeting in Beijing

2008-04-21: W3C holds its semiannual Advisory Committee Meeting on 21-22 April in Beijing, China. W3C Member organizations participate in two days of discussions and strategic planning about W3C Activities and future work. The meeting takes place alongside WWW2008; you are invited to the W3C Track at WWW2008. The media are invited to a press conference with Tim Berners-Lee on 23 April at 3pm local time. Learn how to become a W3C Member and attend the next Advisory Committee Meeting in October 2008 (part of Technical Plenary Week) in Cannes, France. (Photo credit: Ian Jacobs. Permalink)

SVG Working and Interest Groups Chartered

2008-04-16: W3C is pleased to announce the relaunch of the SVG Working Group. Erik Dahlström (Opera Software ASA) and Andrew Emmons (W3C Invited Expert) continue to chair the group, which is chartered to work in public to continue the evolution of Scalable Vector Graphics as a format and a platform, and enhance the adoption and usability of SVG in combination with other technologies. A new SVG Interest Group is also chartered to foster the widespread discussion of Scalable Vector Graphics as a format and a platform, to gather requirements, and enhance the adoption and usability of SVG in combination with other technologies. Learn more about Scalable Vector Graphics. (Permalink)

Feedback Sought on Web Compatibility Test for Mobile Browsers

2008-04-16: The Mobile Web Test Suites Working Group has released a stable version of its Web Compatibility Test for Mobile Browsers, and has sent an invitation to the community to share reports of browser support and other feedback on the test itself. Read more about the design of the test. Read more about the W3C Mobile Web Initiative. (Permalink)

Three RIF Working Drafts Published

2008-04-15: The Rule Interchange Format (RIF) Working Group published three drafts today:

• RIF Basic Logic Dialect (RIF-BLD)
• RIF Framework for Logic Dialects (RIF-FLD)
• RIF RDF and OWL Compatibility (RIF-RDF-OWL)

These drafts help solidify the "pure logic rules" branch of RIF, which is distinct from the "production rules" branch (on which a Working Draft is expected within the next 6 months). Both branches share "RIF Core" (also expected within the next 6 months). The Framework document (FLD) specifies how the various logic dialects relate, while the Basic Logic Dialect (BLD) provides an interlingua for rule languages providing approximately "Horn" expressivity. The third document specifies how BLD can be logically combined with RDF and OWL. Learn more about the Semantic Web Activity. (Permalink)

ISOC-IL New Host of W3C Israel Office

2008-04-15: W3C is pleased to announce that the Israel Chapter of the Internet Society (ISOC-IL) is the new host of the W3C Israel Office. Ori Idan will manage the Office from ISOC-IL. W3C wishes to thank Michel Bercovier and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem for hosting the W3C Israel Office since 1999; Michel will remain involved as senior advisor. Learn more about the the W3C Offices, which promote adoption of W3C Recommendations in local regions among developers, application builders, and other regional stake-holders. (Permalink)

Last Call: The XMLHttpRequest Object

2008-04-15: The Web API Working Group has published the Last Call Working Draft of The XMLHttpRequest Object. The XMLHttpRequest Object specification defines an API that provides scripted client functionality for transferring data between a client and a server. Comments are welcome through 2 June. Learn more about the Rich Web Client Activity. (Permalink)

Delivery Context Ontology Draft Published

2008-04-15: The Ubiquitous Web Applications Working Group has published a Working Draft of Delivery Context Ontology. The Delivery Context Ontology provides a formal model of the characteristics of the environment in which devices interact with the Web or other services. The delivery context is an important source of information that can be used to adapt materials to make them useable on a wide range of different devices with different capabilities. The delivery context includes the characteristics of the device, the software used to access the service and the network providing the connection among others. This document describes the ontology (using OWL) and gives details of each property that it contains. Learn more about the Ubiquitous Web Applications Activity. (Permalink)

Web Services Internationalization Draft Published

2008-04-15: The Internationalization Core Working Group has published a Working Draft of Web Services Internationalization (WS-I18N). This document describes enhancements to SOAP messaging to provide internationalized and localized operations using locale and international preferences. These mechanisms can be used to accommodate a wide variety of development models for international usage. Learn more about the Internationalization Activity. (Permalink)

Device Description Repository Core Vocabulary Group Note Published

2008-04-15: The Mobile Web Initiative Device Description Working Group has published a Group Note of Device Description Repository Core Vocabulary. This document identifies properties that are considered essential for adaptation of content in the Mobile Web. Its intended use is to define a baseline Vocabulary for Device Description Repository (DDR) implementations. The Vocabulary defined in this document is not intended to represent an exhaustive set of properties for content adaptation. DDR Implementations that require additional properties are free to make use of additional vocabularies. The process of creating a new Vocabulary can be modeled on the process described in this document. Learn more about the Mobile Web Initiative Activity. (Permalink)

Incubator Group Report: Uncertainty Reasoning for the World Wide Web

2008-04-15: The Uncertainty Reasoning for the World Wide Web Incubator Group published their final report. The document includes a set of use case descriptions that illustrate situations for reasoning under uncertainty; some of the use cases include comprehensive information and details on how uncertainty would help to address issues that cannot be properly addressed with current deterministic approaches. The document also identifies methodologies that may be applied to address the use cases and that show promise as candidate solutions for uncertainty reasoning on the scale of the World Wide Web. This publication is part of the Incubator Activity, a forum where W3C Members can innovate and experiment. This work is not on the W3C standards track. (Permalink)

Incubator Group Report: Common Web Language

2008-04-15: The Common Web Language Incubator Group published their final report. The goal of the Common Web Language is to allow the exchange of information through the Web and also for enabling computers to process information semantically. CWL allows people to describe contents and meta-data of Web pages written in natural language; the language seeks to lower language barriers and to facilitate the automatic extraction of information from Web pages. This publication is part of the Incubator Activity, a forum where W3C Members can innovate and experiment. This work is not on the W3C standards track. (Permalink)

Four "Widgets 1.0" Working Drafts Published

2008-04-14: The Web Application Formats Working Group has published four Working Drafts related to Widgets 1.0: The Widget Landscape (Q1 2008), Packaging and Configuration, Digital Signature, and Requirements; these are the First Public drafts for Digital Signatures and Landscape. Widgets are small client-side Web applications for displaying and updating remote data, that are packaged in a way to allow a single download and installation on a client machine, mobile phone, or mobile Internet device. "Landscape" reviews commonalities and fragmentation across widget user agents and explores how fragmentation currently affects, amongst other things, authoring, security, distribution and deployment, internationalization and the device-independence of widgets. "Packaging" defines a Zip-based packaging format and an XML-based configuration document format for widgets. "Digital Signature" defines a profile of the XML-Signature Syntax and Processing specification to allow a widget resource to be digitally signed. "Requirements" lists the design goals and requirements that specification would need to address in order to standardize various aspects of widgets. Learn more about the Rich Web Client Activity. (Permalink)

Content Transformation Guidelines 1.0, Comments on First Public Draft Welcome

2008-04-14: The Mobile Web Best Practices Working Group has published the First Public Working Draft of Content Transformation Guidelines 1.0. This document provides guidance to managers of content transformation proxies and to content providers for how to coordinate when delivering Web content. Content transformation techniques diverge widely on the web, with many non-standard HTTP implications, and no well-understood means either of identifying the presence of such transforming proxies, nor of controlling their actions. This document establishes a framework to allow that to happen. Learn more about the Mobile Web Initiative Activity. (Permalink)

Multimodal Architecture and Interfaces Working Draft Published

2008-04-14: The Multimodal Interaction Working Group has published an updated Working Draft of Multimodal Architecture and Interfaces (MMI Architecture), which defines a loosely coupled architecture for multimodal user interfaces. The main change in this draft is a more thorough specification of the events sent between the Runtime Framework and the Modality Components, including both schemas for the individual messages and ladder diagrams showing message sequences. The architecture envisioned by the Working Group will provide a general and flexible framework providing interoperability among modality-specific components from different vendors - for example, speech recognition from one vendor and handwriting recognition from another. Learn more about W3C's Multimodal Interaction Activity. (Permalink)

Requirements of Japanese Text Layout Draft Published

2008-04-11: Participants from four W3C Groups CSS, Internationalization Core, SVG and XSL Working Groups as part of the Japanese Layout Task Force published Requirements of Japanese Text Layout. This document describes requirements for general Japanese layout realized with technologies like CSS, SVG and XSL-FO. The document is mainly based on a standard for Japanese layout, JIS X 4051. However, it also addresses areas which are not covered by JIS X 4051. Japanese version is also available. Learn more about basics of Japanese text layout and W3C's Internationalization Activity. (Permalink)

Six OWL 2 Drafts Published

2008-04-11: The OWL Working Group published six drafts today related to the OWL 2 Web Ontology Language:

• Structural Specification and Functional-Style Syntax
• Model-Theoretic Semantics
• Mapping to RDF Graphs
• XML Serialization
• Profiles
• Primer

OWL 2 (previously known as OWL 1.1) defines extensions to OWL, which is one of the core standards of the Semantic Web. Semantic Web terms (such as "author" or "title") can be organized into vocabularies (such as "data about publications"). OWL is used to represent the meaning of terms (see, for example, the work of the Health Care and Life Sciences Interest Group) in these vocabularies (or, "ontologies'), and relationships between those terms. Three of the drafts published today (syntax, semantics, and mapping-to-rdf) are the same as their January 2008 counterparts except for the name change. Of the three new drafts: "XML Serialization" specifies a new XML (not RDF/XML) syntax for OWL; "Profiles" specifies subsets (logical fragments) of OWL that target particular application contexts; and the "Primer" provides a unified technical introduction to OWL 2. The Working Group seeks feedback on these drafts and has highlighted particular issues throughout the documents. Learn more about the Semantic Web. (Permalink)

Last Call: XHTML Role Attribute Module

2008-04-10: The XHTML2 Working Group has published the second Last Call Working Draft of XHTML Role Attribute Module. The XHTML Role Attribute defined in this specification allows the author to annotate XML Languages with machine-extractable semantic information about the purpose of an element. Use cases include accessibility, device adaptation, server-side processing, and complex data description. This attribute can be integrated into any markup language based upon XHTML Modularization. Comments are welcome through 10 May. Learn more about the HTML Activity. (Permalink)

Language Bindings for DOM Specifications Draft Published

2008-04-10: The Web API Working Group has published the Working Draft of Language Bindings for DOM Specifications. This specification defines an Interface Definition Language (IDL) to be used by other specifications that define a Document Object Model (DOM). The document also addresses how interfaces described with this IDL correspond to constructs within ECMAScript and Java execution environments. Learn more about the Rich Web Client Activity. (Permalink)

Mathematical Markup Language (MathML) Version 3.0 Draft Published

2008-04-09: The Math Working Group has published a Working Draft of Mathematical Markup Language (MathML) Version 3.0. This is the third draft of MathML, an XML application for describing mathematical notation and capturing both its structure and content. The goal of MathML is to enable mathematics to be served, received, and processed on the World Wide Web, just as HTML has enabled this functionality for text. Learn more about the Math Activity. (Permalink)

Rich Web Application Backplane Incubator Group to Study Building Blocks for Web Applications

2008-04-09: W3C is pleased to announce the creation of the Rich Web Application Backplane Incubator Group, sponsored by W3C Members CWI, HP, IBM, and Xerox. The mission of the XG is to explore and refine the architecture of a "Rich Web Application Backplane" -- a set of common building blocks for Web applications. The XG charter states: "[B]enefits to end-user interaction of adopting such common infrastructure will include richer user interaction enabled through simplified approaches to mixing multiple interaction technologies in a single application. The ability to easily share data across multiple components, and to freely intermix AJAX and declarative components, should support a wider range of high function composable UIs." Like all XG's, this group's work is not standards-track. Read more about the Incubator Activity, an initiative to foster development of emerging Web-related technologies. (Permalink)